I know it sounds bizarre, but when I heard of the ban on bullfighting passed by the regional parliament in Catalonia, I thought of Charlie Chaplin.

Bear with me. In 20th-century Spain, when cinema began to make a dent in the popularity of bullfighting, a new act was incorporated into many corridas. It was known as the charlotada: a Chaplin impersonator would perform a mock-bullfight, only that the bull was all too real. It was absurd, it was pitiful and, of course, it was a huge success. So much so that it lasted long enough for someone my age to watch it one day at a bleak country fair.

Seeing Chaplin gored by a bull is something that really sticks in your mind as a child, although coming from the least bullfighting-oriented region in Spain (Galicia) I was perhaps predestined not be a fan. But I never became a fully convinced opponent either. As someone who has been exposed to the bullfighting controversy for years, I've learned to ponder the merits of both arguments. Or, to put it differently, I've grown accustomed to the inconsistencies of both.

I believe that aficionados have a point when they say that the fighting bull would disappear as a species were it not for the fiesta, but they lose it when they try to prove "scientifically" that bulls don't suffer. Conversely, environmentalists are correct when they say bullfighting is cruel (even Himmler, the head of the SS, fainted at a corrida in Madrid in 1940). But I think they are wrong when they insist that there can be nothing artistic about it. What they mean is that art has to be moral, which is more than debatable.

In fact, if artists were drawn to the bullring it was precisely for its cruelty, or, as they would say, for its savage beauty. Hemingway loved it for the same reasons he loved war, and Picasso for the same reasons he loved women ("love" having here no moral connotations either). The two would have agreed with the Catalan parliament in its definition of bullfighting as "barbaric and outdated".

Because outdated it is. The fiesta has been slowly agonising for decades, like a bull in the ring. The breed never really recovered from the civil war (1936-39), which included a little known genocide of bulls (they were all eaten during the years of hunger). If bullfighting experienced brief revivals it was because of a particular superstar like Manolete or El Cordobés. But at the end the matador was to stumble upon a far mightier antagonist than any four-legged animal: the footballer. My father used to tell me about that barber in Madrid offering his customers a choice of conversation: "Football or bullfighting?" Soon the choice became overwhelmingly the ball, not the bull.

There are now those who see the ban as the work of Catalan nationalists wanting to erase a Spanish tradition, but they miss the point. Actually, those filing the petition are only animal rights activists, their leader is Argentinean and many nationalist MPs have, in fact, voted against the ban. The truth is simpler: a tradition needs not only to be old, it has to survive as well, and bullfighting is dying everywhere in Spain shrouded in nostalgia and indifference. Catalonia has only sped up a natural process of decay.

Even the voices now calling for the defence of the fiesta resort to an argument that sounds like a death sentence: bullfighting should be preserved because it's a relic. Ironically, for all their Spanish flag waving, it's in the south of France where bullfighting still has an enthusiastic following, but even there it will wane as breeding bulls becomes less and less profitable as a business.

The final bugle, the one that announces in the bullring the imminent death of the bull, has sounded its call. Only that it's not for the bull this time, but for the whole world of bullfighting. Chaplin will have his revenge after all.